Match of the Century Mural

The undeveloped lot beside the building left its side wall open above the parking lot. In the quarter, such blank surfaces began to be given over to large murals after the artists convinced residents and municipal employees that street painting could have a permanent place here, rather than appear as random inscriptions. This wall covers almost one thousand square meters; at the edge of the football scene, the goalkeeper, a newspaper strip, and the score can be seen.

At the center of the mural, forward Sándor Kocsis heads the ball, and it hits the post. Midfielder József Bozsik has not yet managed to collect the rebound, while winger Zoltán Czibor has already thrown up his arms. The artists chose the second before Hungary’s fifth goal.

On November twenty-fifth, nineteen fifty-three, the Hungarian national team came to Wembley Stadium in London. In the entire history of international matches, England had never lost at home to a team from outside the British Isles. The Hungarians were Olympic champions, but ten days earlier they had struggled to draw with Sweden and feared that their usual style of play would fall apart on English turf.

Coach Gusztáv Sebes instructed center forward Nándor Hidegkuti to move away from goal and drop deeper into the field. English defenders were used to waiting for such a player near the penalty area. When they moved after Hidegkuti, gaps opened between them for captain Ferenc Puskás and Kocsis. Hidegkuti scored in the fiftieth second, then added two more goals. Puskás scored twice.

The fifth goal began with the episode on the wall. Kocsis’s shot struck the post; Bozsik collected the ball and, from eighteen meters, sent it into the top corner. Czibor raised his arms even before the shot. Hungary won six to three and became the first national team from outside the British Isles to beat England on its own ground. Six months later, the English tried to take revenge in Budapest and lost seven to one.

Sixty years later, the muralist collective Neopaint decided to transfer one of the goals to a blank wall above a parking lot on Rumbach Sebestyén Street. The artists spent almost two years gathering material, looking for a suitable surface and partners. They wanted to reproduce the goal itself, but too few high-quality photographs of the match had survived. No suitable photograph was found, so the composition had to be changed. It was based on a frame showing Kocsis by the post—the last recorded moment before Bozsik’s shot.

At the time, commissions like this were not yet routine work for Neopaint. In two thousand eleven, the collective painted its first wall in this neighborhood for free, to convince residents and municipal employees that large-scale street painting was not the same as random graffiti. After that, the artists were entrusted with new surfaces, and in two thousand thirteen a project to renew the blank walls of Erzsébetváros appeared. The enormous open side wall of a building above an undeveloped lot made it possible to spread the football scene across almost one thousand square meters. It took three weeks and about four hundred liters of paint.

Gyula Grosics, the goalkeeper of that Hungarian national team, agreed to become the project’s patron. The artists placed him on the left, in a separate episode with a saved shot. When the mural was unveiled, Grosics remained one of the match’s two living participants; less than a year later, he died. What remains on the wall now is what the old photo archive allowed the artists to choose: Kocsis’s ball is still by the post, Czibor is already celebrating, and the end of the attack is marked only by the score “six to three” and the newspaper strip beside it.